Build the Best Gaming PC for Any Budget

It’s a great time to build a fast, new PC. With stellar titles like Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins—Awakening, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and Supreme Commander 2, there’s plenty of good stuff these days to dive into. But that means you’ll also need top-of-the-line parts, an unusually understanding spouse, and a high credit card limit, right?

Not so fast. Despite what you may have heard, you don’t have to spend a fortune building a gaming PC. Prices have continued to drop throughout 2010. With the advent of giant killer parts like AMD’s excellent Radeon HD 5770 video card and Athlon II X3 440 CPU, and Intel’s LGA 1156 desktop CPU socket, it’s possible to build great gaming PCs at surprisingly low price points.

In fact, today, you can build a solid custom PC for just $500and therefore, break into this hobby on the deep end. A machine like this can easily play newer PC titles, at least at reasonable levels of detail. A bit later in this article, we’ll show you exactly how to do that.

But what if you’re a little more fortunate and have, say, $100 more than that? What’s the best way to invest that extra cash? We’ll also tell you what you can add that will make that $500 system even better. (It turns out you can boost its performance by quite a bit.) We won’t stop there, either; what if, instead of an extra $100, you have $250 more? You can swap two or three components out for better ones, and boomyou now have a killer $750 PC. And so on.

This decision-making process is something we’ve wanted to cover directly for a long time. For this article, we’re going to walk the novice PC builder through the component selection process, at six different price points. The good news: You don’t have to be constrained by the amount of money you have. There are always numerous ways to solve any sort of configuration problem.

We want to take as far as possible the elemental idea that PC building is a modular activitywith sweet rewards at many different price points.